Generous Play

Rob Donoghue at his Walking Mind blog at the Evil Hat website writes about generous play as a play style:

most of my favorite players also subscribe to this model. They’re there to have fun, and they engage the rest of the table to help drive that fun. If you get a table full of people playing this way it can be a joy to watch as the fun-ball gets passed around with vigorous enthusiasm, and the desire to elevate each other elevates the whole table.

I was drawn to his distinctions because at Story Games Westchester, we are entirely on one side of the equations here: we employ generous, personal play or our games don’t work. We try to see what each other want to have fun and each move to accommodate that story, the mode of play, that content, but we also have equal authority and so we each have to advocate for our own play, our own fun. It works for us, or it mostly does.